Analysis of transitivity in Awoonor’s just to buy corn and Yeboah-Afari’s the sound of pestles

Abstract

The study uses Halliday's transitivity theory as a framework to analyse how language has been used by Kofi Awoonor and Adjoa Yeboah-Afari to reveal how the African experience is represented from the Ghanaian perspective in their respective stories Just to Buy Corn and The Sound of Pestles. The primary focus is on the analysis of transitivity in the selected stories and how the interplay between processes, participants and circumstances is used as representation of the author‟s perception of the Ghanaian experience. Using the qualitative design and the interpretative content analysis, the study finds that material processes abound in both texts analysed. The dominance of material processes in the stories indicates the existence of a lot of physical actions in the African experience. The existential process types are used in the stories to describe the places where the setting of each story is set. They are also used to point to some of the challenges the characters face as well as their conditions before the narrative time to make readers fully appreciate their problems. The conclusion drawn from the study is that the selected stories use more primary process types than secondary types. The study confirms that the transitivity system can help in analysing clauses effectively and also helps us encode our experiences of the world. The study recommends that Systemic Functional Grammar is made an integral part of the English curriculum so that students will be abreast of the requisite skills for textual analysis.